March is an important month at Jazz. As a leader in sleep medicine, the month serves as an awareness opportunity for those living with sleep disorders, as well as their caregivers, healthcare providers and our advocacy partners. We honor Sleep Awareness Month, but we also celebrate the National Sleep Foundation’s 25th annual Sleep Awareness Week. This year, we also have the honor of celebrating this meaningful awareness month as we celebrate a significant milestone for our company – our 20th anniversary!
Over the past two decades, we have remained focused on patient populations with high unmet need and growing our pipeline that targets complex diseases. We are not deterred by what may seem difficult and thrive where others see obstacles, exploring the world around us to develop and deliver innovative medicines. As part of our commitment to achieving this goal, our colleagues have worked diligently to improve the lives of people living with these devastating sleep disorders by providing solutions and resources that aim to prioritize their safety and well-being.
While Sleep Awareness Month is a time for us to honor and raise awareness around the sleep community, it also serves as a reminder of the importance of prioritizing innovative, safer patient outcomes. Patient safety is of the utmost importance to Jazz and to me. Whether it be providing solutions that keep the patients’ holistic health in mind or ensuring appropriate processes are in place to minimize risk and maximize benefit – we consider the patient journey and strive to transform the lives of patients and their families through our treatments.
We have consistently taken key steps toward addressing safety to positively impact patients. Importantly, we understand that people living with sleep disorders, including narcolepsy, are at increased risk of cardiovascular comorbidities, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity and diabetes.1,2,3,4 Focusing on the holistic health of the patient has always been a priority at Jazz. By taking a holistic approach to patient care, we can better equip members of the sleep community with solutions that consider their health and safety beyond their condition. We continue to advance our industry-leading neuroscience pipeline into new areas to help even more prospective patients.
Second, we are driven by providing innovative, safe solutions to patients which is why we are committed to our Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS). Jazz works with leading clinical experts, scientists, patient advocates and, most importantly, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to educate and enable the safe use of our products while mitigating associated risk. Our REMS program was required and approved by the FDA to help make sure patients are appropriately receiving their medicines and they know how to use their treatment properly. This is an important step in our commitment to patient safety and the safe distribution of this treatment.
We know that our work in sleep goes beyond the month of March. I co-founded the company on the promise of improving outcomes for patients with serious conditions, and over the past two decades our impact has expanded from an initial focus in narcolepsy to additional sleep disorders and research across more areas of neuroscience and also oncology. With an innovation-first mentality and patient-focused approach, we have been able to deliver transformative therapies in hard-to-treat and underserved conditions.
